Monday, August 8, 2011

Interesting to see that Yahoo 'Moneywise' has done a big splash investigating whether residents of Scotland or England get the best deal in a range of policy areas. Scotland comes out on top on three out of four counts - university fees, healthcare costs and transport costs. State benefits are declared a 'draw' - unsurprising, given that they aren't devolved!

Now, you all know the punchline here. The fact that the Scottish government is providing the public with a better financial deal is perfectly fine - but the problem is they're doing it deliberately...

Agreed, Ezio, although that's fairly mild by his standards. He's also obsessed with the idea that IQ tests can prove that black people are innately less intelligent than white people.

I've somehow managed to keep away from PB for a couple of weeks, which is probably just as well given the circumstances. I can just imagine what insights the 'politically neutral' Poster of the Year is offering at the moment.

James, the really scary thing here is that Lord Lardy was sober when he said this.

Knowing your proclivity for the forensic dissection of the twisted logic of those ‘crazy guys’ at Labour Shame, might I offer this contribution. On the ‘Same-sex marriage’ thread on Labour Shame, Indy was taken to task by ‘admin’ for making the reasonable point, based on an official document, that the SNP could not unilaterally legislate on civil marriage because, under present constitutional arrangements, this would create all kinds of problems for Scottish citizens in other parts of the UK. Here’s Indy’s offending sentence:

“if the Scottish civil partnership scheme materially differed from that developed by the UK government, for example, by the inclusion of opposite sex couples, then this could create significant cross border difficulties”.

A reasonable (and realistic) point you might think, given current constitutional arrangements. So how did the mastermind behind ‘admin’ at Labour Shame respond?:

“ Indy, you have just given us a brilliantly and concisely argued case for maintaining the union”!

No she hasn’t. What she has done is to point out the realities of the Scottish government’s predicament and the inadequacies of current constitutional arrangements. In other words, what she has done, in effect, is to put the argument for independence, an argument that, clearly completely escapes admin.

To see this more clearly, we need to follow the ‘logic’ that informs our resident mastermind at Labour Shame. For, in submitting his reply to Indy, somewhere in the cavity between his ears, a little voice must have told him that he was on a roll, so he decided to end his reply to Indy with this little gem:

“The logic of independence says we must legislate for what we think is right here in Scotland. But, as Indy implies, that’s a very old-fashioned and anachronistic notion these days”!

I’ll pass over the obvious point that Indy “implies” no such thing, for the substance of admin’s point here is so precious that nothing should be allowed to distract us from it. Let’s re-run this point but, this time, move away from the issue of civil marriage and on to another topical and important issue, the ongoing cuts and deficit reduction plan of the present Tory government.

From the results of the 2010 British general election and the 2011 Scottish general election, we can take it that the vast majority of voters in Scotland don’t support the Tories’ deficit reduction plan. According to Labour Shame though, although we might want different policies in Scotland to the rest of the UK, this desire of ours is “old-fashioned and anachronistic” for, you see, that’s not the way that it works in the modern world. In the modern world, the way it works is this: the people of country A vote for political parties that support one set of policies, and the people of country B elect a government that support the opposite set of policies which the government of country B then imposes on the people of country A. So there we have it, this is how democracy works in the modern world of Labour Shame.

Now this may be news to the people of other countries but that’s only because the people of those countries are still so “old-fashioned and anachronistic”, that they believe in something they call democracy. Never fear though, they’ll soon catch up with our ‘modern’ ways in Scotland and, like us, they’ll soon come to the conclusion that there’s not much point in voting at all really.

On the basis of the pearls of wisdom passed on to us from the pages of Labour Shame, I’ve come to the conclusion that not only has ‘Scottish Labour’ stopped listening to the Scottish electorate, they seem to have lost the ability to listen to themselves.

Thanks, Anon - I agree with every word. Now that we've established that 'Admin' is Tom Harris, I wonder if the seventh 'impossible question for nationalists' will be "why hasn't Alex Salmond personally flogged any teenage mothers yet?".

Given his propensity for swallowing everything whole, he’d fit in quite well with those earnest young Tories who write for Labour Shame. Who knows, we might even be looking at the next leader of ‘Scottish’ Labour here.